Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Holland to Auschwitz for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the … – Le Figaro

The head of state found Tuesday in Poland many counterparts and foreign officials to warn the mondre against hate and intolerance.

Francois Hollande celebrated in Poland on Tuesday the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. This movement of the head of state comes three weeks after the Paris bombings in which four Jews were killed.

Before leaving for Poland, the head of state will travel Tuesday morning at Memorial Shoah in Paris where he will celebrate in the presence of a hundred survivors of the camps, 75,000 Jews deported from France, under the collaborationist Vichy regime.

Then in the afternoon, French presidents, German Joachim Gauck and Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, the head of the Russian presidential administration Sergei Ivanov and US Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew must attend the particular main ceremony at the memorial in Birkenau, a place of extermination of a million European Jews. The Belgian King Philip I, accompanied by his wife Matilda and the Netherlands Willem-Alexander with Queen Maxima are also expected to attend, along with twenty other presidents or prime ministers. A hundred former prisoners come with a minister of Israel. Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow Stanislaw Dziwisz will be there on behalf of the Holy See. Speeches are expected.

Moscow explained the absence of President Vladimir Putin by the fact that he had not been invited. In fact, no official invitation has been sent to politicians, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum has decided to focus this 70th anniversary of the survivors, many of which are in their nineties.

progressive Dissolution

It was the Soviet Army that liberated 27 January 1945 the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where 1.1 million people had been exterminated, one million Jews from various European countries.

The largest and deadliest of all extermination and Nazi concentration camps is the only one to have been preserved as it was abandoned by the Germans fleeing the Red Army. This release was preceded by the gradual dissolution of the complex, from the summer of 1944 and the evacuation of more than 60,000 inmates. When the Soviets arrived, they discovered that 7,000 prisoners and, unable to keep their comrades in what was called the “death march”.

The liberation of the camps has indeed started on July 24, 1944 with that of the Majdanek camp (on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland) by the Red Army and ended on May 8 with the unconditional surrender of Germany. Before their release, other Nazi death camps in Poland, like Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec, were completely destroyed by the Germans to erase traces.

Trauma Parisian attacks

“In the times that we know, at a time when there was a few days on the soil of France, Jews were murdered because again they were Jews, it was particularly important that the president speaks to remind both the need to remember history and to convey the meaning “to avoid” abomination “is again emphasizes the Hollande entourage.

Nearly three years after the killings in 2012 in Montauban and Toulouse by Mohamed Merah, who killed seven people, including three children in a Jewish school, Paris bombings of 7, 8 and 9 January also caused immense trauma in the Jewish community, while several years anti-Semitic acts have multiplied in France.

So much so, that after the murderous attack Hyper Hide Porte de Vincennes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reminded “all the Jews of France” that Israel was their “home”, causing a sharp retort from his counterpart Manuel Valls: “France, without the Jews of France, is not France.”

Significantly, France is in any case become in 2014, for the first time since 1948, the first country of emigration to Israel, with over 6,000 Jews (against 3,400 in 2013) who left to join the Hexagon Israel.